They say that if you can remember being a parliamentary researcher, you weren’t really a parliamentary researcher. The drama and hedonism of life in Westminster overwhelms the memory. You may have the odd vivid flashback of running out of an orgy to fix a gathering scandal by blackmailing a journalist, but that is about it. I would like to say that I was such a Party Animal.
How is it then that I vividly remember standing outside the Red Lion pub in Whitehall wondering whether to have a packet of pork scratchings or to go home for dinner? How is it I remember crafting parliamentary questions on haddock stocks? How is it that I remember the never-ending summer recesses when all SW1 was sleeping, and I spent whole afternoons working through the Blockbusters’ quizbook with the researcher next door?
Such drama as there was would come from the constituents more often than parliament. I remember one marching with a placard outside the office. Her complaint was that she was housebound and I had not agreed to go and visit her at home. I remember one wonderful woman whom I spent months talking to through the course of her cancer treatment, and the final decision that every possibility had been exhausted. During her last few weeks, her husband worked to fulfil every wish, however small. Our last phone call was prompted by the purchase of a silent running washing machine she had long wanted. She held the phone to it mid-cycle. I could hear almost nothing – even though, she told me, it was on spin.
The next day they travelled on a whim hundreds of miles to see me and visit the House of Commons. Despite her wheelchair and evident state, the Sarjeant at Arms’ men refused to let her in to the empty chamber. It was waiting for a tour of fee-paying Americans.
This is not the stuff of the West Wing. The only time it was like the West Wing was when people were pretending to be in the West Wing. Politicians and their researchers are as imitative as a troop of macaques. When Bill Clinton started saying ‘you know’, so did the prime minister. Weeks later, any researcher buying a cup of coffee couldn’t manage the transaction without randomly inserting ‘you know’s’. When President George W Bush visited London it took days before the characteristic ‘pimp roll’ walk of his staff had spread as efficiently as ebola. People were walking with stiff, slight bowed legs and a swaying swagger. When they talked to people they jerked around on the balls of their feet, never still.
I can’t criticise BBC 2’s Party Animals for not being something that it never aimed to be: that is a comedy of power and a drama of everyday life. Television dramas based around a professional setting always emphasise authenticity of surface details – police uniforms, endless shots of the Common’s chamber, military cap badges – to hide the fact that they are completely promiscuous with the felt reality of that profession. Did you know that it is more dangerous to be a window cleaner than a fireman? Did you know that fishing is particularly bad for fatalities? Prepare yourself for a primetime drama about a trawlerman who cleans windows in his spare time – that’s real excitement.
Now that politics is a profession, it is inevitable that it builds up its own literature. But the magic of the West Wing, on a good day, is that the political setting is a jumping off point. It is really a show about ethical dilemmas. Sometimes, I expect a moral epilogue to explain the proverb of the show, like He-Man cartoons. The Sopranos, arguably the greatest television show of all time, is not about the mafia. That is just the setting; the drama is about families and politics. Ultimately, Party Animals, for all the good touches, does not take off. It feels like a collage of racy anecdotes coaxed out of former researchers on licensed premises.